"The spirit of a culture is the pervasive sense of the normative state of life lived from within the cultural perspective. It may be happy and optimistic or unhappy and despairing. The issue is whether the cultural mind, as a way of structuring the experience, thought, aspirations, and action of the people, makes possible knowledge of reality, competence and strength in coping with reality, and, in general, high life-morale and human well-being.
– E.M. Adams, Philosophy and the Modern Mind